After a fantastic, rather quiet weekend of antique shopping and old-French-movie-watching alone with my mom, my joy was brought crashing down around me as I made a sad realization: I'm pretty sure one of my sisters doesn't love me. We'll call her "X" for anonymity's sake: well I was with X driving to downtown LA to pick up a different sister, and before we were even pulled out of the parking spot X started berating me that I didn't have my cell phone with me. Now, never mind the fact that she didn't have her cell phone with her either, but she was practically crucifying me for not obliging to what she thought was a necessary nicety: how dare I leave the house without my cell phone? She was really honestly upset. So, as an attempt to protect our already rocky relationship, I told her that I wanted her to stop talking about it, that she was being too aggressive and I didn't want to yell at her or say something mean. I thought "wow, pat on the back self. You're being mature in the way you handle this situation." Well, she clammed up for the rest of the ride (1.5 hours) and didn't say a word. Now imagine a flashback from a TV show with all of the squiggly lines:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When we were little kids, I admittedly treated X like crap. My older brother used to kick me around a whole lot, and we get along really well now, so I kind of took that example on how to treat my other sisters. Turns out, it didn't work. She would tell her friends how incredibly awful and terrible I was to her, and they would in turn tell their older sisters (my friends) about it. Then my friends would tell me I was a total jerk and they couldn't understand how I could be so awful. I was ashamed and humiliated when that started happening, so I decided to be a better big sister. Well, that didn't work because she still hates me. When I went off to college I had high hopes that absence would help to cure our problems. The first summer I came home went okay, but by the second summer she was telling me that I was a "fat, lazy, cow" and that was 30 pounds ago!! She started having this pattern of not wanting "share" people: if we had mutual people in our lives, she would either lose interest in them all together or become incredibly (and quite vocally) exclusive of them, and tell me how they were hers (in many more words.) Basically, she wanted nothing in common with me. And her personality went from sweet and shy to loud and in-your-face. And we haven't really ever learned to get along.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Back to the present, I have tried for a long time to improve my relationship with her. I buy her stuff, I try to talk to her, I try to spend quality time together, etc. etc., but she still is pretty aloof and cold towards me. And after dinner, after 5 or so hours where she hasn't looked at me or said a word to me, I'm pretty sure that she doesn't love me. I think that she likes me 10% of the time and can tolerate me about 50% of the time, and other than that, we're doomed. Why else would she persist to verbally abuse me every time we meet new people? It makes me look like a giant loser.